MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • The first novel in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love—and stories themselves.Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984—look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons r...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From a literary master, a novel of ghosts and history and family legacy, of the unexpected acts of care that shine light into our dark.Ghosts don't exist.They don't. End of.Story, however.It is haunting.Everything tells it.It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themsel...

**MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take."Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books**One of the New York Times’s100 Best Books of the 21st Century...

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015"An NYRB Classics OriginalThe Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else ...

A Stylist Magazine (UK) pick for Best New NonfictionA That Eric Alper pick for My Next ReadsThe Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.As...

BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall th...

Margaret Tait (1918– 1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies...

Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author's trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people.Each of the Smarts*—parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid—*encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows th...

A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by sixteen bestselling, award-winning writers.'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror'Where power and feminist rage meet' StylistBANSHEE. DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE.

Ali Smith's "beautifully written, precise, poetic" (The Observer) debut that follows the briefly intertwined lives of two young womenWhen we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma-a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by....

From the Man Booker Prize finalist: Seasonal Quartet is a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, which, when taken together, give us something more—all four united by the passing of time, the timing of narrative, and the endless familiarity yet renewal that the cycle of the seasons is.Grounded in current politics, in the work of artists Pauline Boty,...

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book andlonglisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?Spring. The great connective.With an eye to the migrancy of...